When Beata Heuman was asked to design the interior of a 19th-century Manhattan townhouse that had recently been restored to its original condition, she immediately thought of Henry James’s 1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady. The building had been erected a decade later, at a time of great promise and expansion in the United States. ‘A big theme of Henry James’s was the tension between Europe and America, between the old and new world,’ the interior designer says. ‘He was writing about these two colliding, and he was romanticising Europe quite a lot.’ This idea became a jumping-off point for Heuman, whose wide-ranging references often toggle between an old-world sensibility and a new-world confidence. Here the project was less about creating a strict interpretation of the Gilded Age than it was about reflecting the passage of time. Historical details are intended to accumulate throughout the house without fuss, sitting alongside more modern references, ultimately creating a place that feels more lived-in than over-designed.
‘It’s a romanticised idea of the past,’ says Heuman, who is Swedish, and lives and works in London, having spent many formative years in her career working under Nicky Haslam. ‘We’re always drawn to that kind of expression, but even more so for this particular project, because the house had such a sense of history. Very little had been taken out. So many original features were still there: all the doors and the woodwork and almost all of the fireplaces. That told us what the house needed and we were really trying to retain that as much as we possibly could. If we were adding things, we were adding them to enhance that even further.’
According to chief architect Andrew Oyen, of Ferguson & Shamamian, the area around the property had been farmland and was originally developed to appeal to upper-middle-class white families, whose arrival was anticipated with the boom of industrial wealth then sweeping the nation. But prospects changed with a recession in 1893. ‘There was a glut of real-estate development at the time, and the buildings couldn’t sell, which meant that educated, wealthy African-Americans began to buy them,’ he says. Parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn flowered into bustling all-Black neighbourhoods. By the end of the Great Depression in 1936, however, this particular property had become a rooming house, with the four floors sub-divided into units, and remained that way until the current owner bought it in 2019. Certain original features, such as a set of oak pocket doors here and a small fireplace there, only revealed themselves in the course of Ferguson & Shamamian’s careful renovation. The owner wanted to avoid the house looking overly polished and so many period details, including the wooden floors and cast-iron radiators, were only gently touched up to preserve their patina. ‘Often clients want things to be perfect,’ says Heuman. ‘But here, the owner wanted us to embrace the fact the floorboards are all wonky and it’s an old house, which was really freeing. I think it very much brought out the best in us. That’s really what we believe in. Sometimes people don’t get that: they don’t want a creaky door, they want everything to be straight – but nothing is perfect.’
The front door opens on to a vestibule adjoining a large formal dining room, but the home’s true heart is to be found one flight up, where three interconnecting libraries are filled skirting-board to ceiling with the owner’s books. Two large rat-tan pendant lamps by Soane anchor each end of this enfilade, along with matching bookshelves inspired by Francesco Carrara’s apartment in Venice, their uprights subtly echoing Manhattan’s skyline in stepped spires at the top. Heuman has used gentle shades of brown, blue and green throughout, but extravagant touches are evident too, such as a hidden bar entirely lined with marquetry and separated from the study by a pair of baize-covered butler doors. The wood-panelled walls were inspired by the paintings of De Chirico and suit the decadent green Cipollino marble along the bar’s top and sink. A final detail, a removable ashtray, nods to the loos at the Southbank Centre in London, according to Fosca Mariani, Heuman’s head of interior design, and adds a dash of insouciance to the otherwise bookish aura.
Other playful notes emerge as one moves through the house. In the main bedroom, for instance, a ‘Flying Carpet’ armchair by Ettore Sottsass for Bed- ding Brevetti from the 1970s sits by the fireplace, the floor of the principal bathroom is covered, at the owner’s behest, in a kelly-green carpet as impractical as it’s whimsical, the brassware bears just a dash of orange, and a flatscreen television in the dressing room has been made over with a vintage-inspired box stand.
Heuman was especially taken with the pre-existing sprinkler system in the house, which had to stay, and decided it was better to paint some of it red instead of disguising it. ‘It’s such a novelty for us non-Americans,’ she says. Downstairs, in the basement, she chose to exploit the lack of light by creating a screening room with a cork floor painted green, wood panelling and – a clue to its occasional other use – a disco ball. The top floor is dedicated to two further bedrooms and a guest bathroom, all lit by beautifully reconstructed copper sky lanterns.
Heuman isn’t one to match things too carefully. Brass doorknobs rub shoulders with chrome fixtures, gold finishes with dark. Mediterranean tiles in the kitchen dining nook sit alongside a classic British kitchen in butter white. ‘It drives Americans and Scandinavians crazy,’ she says of her idiosyncratic approach. ‘But I want to make a place that’s layered, that gives you a sense it wasn’t created all at once’.
Sign up for our weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive interiors stories like this one, direct to your inbox. A version of this article also appears in the October 2024 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
